Rocky's Ultimate Challenge: Longs Peak--Longs Peak was a landmark for the Utes, Arapaho, and earlier people who traveled, hunted, and sometimes fought in these mountains, and it is believed that ancient Indians scaled Longs Peak's summit, perhaps in efforts to trap eagles. The first recorded sighting of Longs Peak by white Americans occurred in 1820, when a 19-man army expedition led by Major Stephen Long, a member of the Army Engineers Corps, saw it. On a mission to find the source of the Platte River, the party saw the mountain that would later bear Long's name, but initially mistook it for another great landmark, Pikes Peak. They noted its location but did not attempt to climb it.
When American settlers began moving into the area several decades later, the peak presented an obvious challenge, and some believed the mountain to be insurmountable. After a failed attempt in 1864, William Byers, editor of the Denver newspaper the Rocky Mountain News, wrote, "We are quite sure that no living creature, unless it had wings to fly, was ever upon its summit, and we believe we run no risk in predicting that no man ever will be."
Byers proved himself wrong just 4 years later when he accompanied a group led by John Wesley Powell, a one-armed Civil War veteran, geologist, and seemingly fearless explorer, on a trip all the way to the top. The expedition members reported that they found no evidence that anyone had been to the summit before them, and Byers wrote, "The peak is a nearly level surface, paved with irregular blocks of granite, and without any vegetation of any kind, except a little gray lichen."
More climbers followed, including an Englishwoman, Isabella Bird. One of the first women to reach the summit, she made the ascent with local guide Jim Nugent in the fall of 1873, and later wrote to her sister: "Had I known that the ascent was a real mountaineering feat, I should not have felt the slightest ambition to perform it. As it is, I am only humiliated by my success, for Jim dragged me up, like a bale of goods, by sheer force of muscle." A local minister began taking hikers to the top of Longs Peak in 1878 for $5 per person, and the first recorded winter climb was made by naturalist Enos Mills in 1903.
Although hiking and climbing to the top of Longs Peak soon became relatively common, it remained -- and still remains -- a hazardous expedition. Just before hikers get to the Keyhole, they come upon a stone hut with a bronze tablet that memorializes Agnes Vaille and Herbert Sortland, who died in January 1925. Vaille and another climber are credited with being the first to make a winter ascent along the peak's east face, but the trip exhausted her so much that she could climb only partway down and had frozen to death before a rescue party could reach her. Sortland, a member of that rescue party, had turned back, but became lost, fell and broke a hip, and died of exposure. More than 60 people have perished in attempts to scale Longs Peak.
